As promised, Brett Younger showed up today to install the new dishwasher, just as we were
about to prepare breakfast. Why didn't he tell me when he was coming, as arranged? Oh, he
did: he sent me an SMS ¾ hour
before.
Should only take about 10 minutes, right? Wrong. It took him nearly an hour. Admittedly
he put it in more tidily than I would have done, but I was still surprised.
And when it was done, the thing wouldn't work. After some concerns about DOA, it seems that
this particular model takes a long time to wake up the first time it is used. After that,
all seems to be normal.
First time use was easy enough, though I still need to work out how to load the thing. To
my surprise, the “Auto” setting took over 3 hours, much longer than the other machines. And
in passing I discovered that not only does the machine have a setting 0 for water
hardness, it was set that way when I got it. Other machines have always insisted that the
water has some residual hardness, which is not the case with rain water.
And how does “Extra Dry” work? Not worse than the other machines, but also not completely
dry. The Bosch is better than the Whirlpool, and this seems better than the Bosch, but in
each case glasses and bowls in the top shelf retain water and need to be dried with a tea
towel, so there seems to be little advantage in more drying.
Modern security
Security is important of course, especially on the Internet where so few people really
understand what's going on. But current methods are just plain ridiculous. I hate
CAPTCHAs with a vengeance, and I
suspect that my refusal to fill one out confused The Good Guys' computer system, and maybe that's
why I haven't received a single email from them during the entire fiasco.
But is it necessary? Yesterday I went in to the Ballarat shop and had to pick up an
invoice that they could more easily have sent to me by email. And the only identification
they wanted was a phone number. Anybody could have picked it up.
Somewhere in between is the question of multi-factor
authentication, typically a message sent to your mobile phone. That can work, though
it's irritating. But what if you have initiated the transaction from the same phone? I've
seen a couple of cases like that, and under those circumstances it has no use whatsoever. I
wonder what security will be like in 10 years' time.
Living with SMS
Another pain is SMS. It should no
longer exist. It grew up in the early days of digital phones, where phones and Internet had
nothing to do with each other, and to enter text you had to use the numeric (only) keypad
with multiple presses per letter. Now every phone has Internet standard email, but not only do people not use it,
there seems to be an insurmountable barrier between the two.
Of course, neither SMS nor email are appropriate when you want to contact somebody quickly
and be sure that they get the message. There phone calls are more appropriate, as would
have been this morning when Brett contacted me. But for some reason (maybe difficulty in
using the app) voice calls seem to be decreasing. I just can't understand how anybody can
go through the pain of a glass keyboard for a quick message.
In passing, The Good Guys' sent their
cancellation message by SMS, and it took me a day to find it. If I hadn't found it today,
things would have been very different: instead of $733, they are asking $999, fully $266 or
36% more than I paid. That would certainly have been worth a breach of contract complaint.
Glorious photos
How do you restore old photos? Both Affinity and ACDSee offer functionality to do it. But there are no
tutorials to back it up, and my attempts have been less than successful.
Oh. I had never heard of it. Out to take a look, and yes, it seems to offer just what I
want. Download the trial version, which at least allowed me to rotate images and change
their exposure. But to use the features for which it's intended, I have to buy the product!
OK, it's only (US) $39.20 for a lifetime license for the PRO version. I can do that.
But I ended up paying $7.45 more: they had decided that I was in Germany (why? Do they have
outdated geolocation software?) and charged me 19% EU GST. Sent their support line a message, but
got no response.
Trying it out was almost intuitive,
and with little effort I was able to restore some old photos. Here a couple taken in late
1957:
On the whole, things look a whole lot better, but there are plenty of artefacts that appear
to have been inserted where it couldn't work out what to do, like on my left foot here:
And the aspect ratio seems to change. Maybe there's a way round that. After all, I spent
very little effort to get these results. It also offers other things, like colouring old
photos, and that could be interesting.
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